Fancy
by poestheblackcat
Summary: Summary: Written for comment-fic at LJ. Prompt: Eliot & Sophie, A takeoff on the song Fancy by Reba McEntire. Sophie is Fancy and Eliot is the baby welfare took. How/why does she finally admit to Eliot that they are related?


Summary: Written for comment-fic at LJ. Prompt: Eliot & Sophie, A takeoff on the song Fancy by Reba McEntire. Sophie is Fancy and Eliot is the baby welfare took. How/why does she finally admit to Eliot that they are related?

AN: Oh look, another fanfic when Poesie really should be doing schoolwork. *sigh* **deanangst**, why must you always do this to me?

I'd never heard the song before, but the prompt intrigued me, so I went and listened. Bad idea. Result: ficcage.

* * *

**Fancy**

She'd crafted her persona - _personas_ - well, so very well over the years. No one would ever guess that she was really just creole trash from New Orleans. No one would ever suspect that her name was really Fanny Rae Baker, not Annie Croix, Sophie Devereaux, Charlotte Prentiss the Duchess of Hanover, nor any of those other people she has "been."

No, the only person who could ever suspect is the one person who doesn't remember because he'd been so little when she'd left, when Mama had made her go out into the world to make her fortune by any means necessary.

"_Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they'll be nice to you,"_ she'd said to her as she combed her long, dark hair and made her up and dressed her in the red velvet dress with a slit up to her hip that had been bought with the last of the money.

Most people would have condemned Mama for doing such a thing to the only daughter she had left, but there hadn't been any other choice. Fancy's older sister Nell was dead and gone, and had left the baby into the bargain, little baby Eliot. Mama was sick, going to die soon, and so it was just Fancy, Fancy who had to live. The baby would have been taken in by the welfare people, but Fancy had just turned eighteen, so it was starve with them or leave.

Mama had made the decision for her, but with her advice to "be nice to the gentlemen," she had also given her another pearl of wisdom, _"To thine own self be true,"_ inscribed on the locket which she put around her daughter's neck.

Fancy had torn it off in disgust and thrown it onto the ground, as she turned on her heel to leave this old life behind for good. But now, years later, she finds herself wondering what had become of the locket, where it is now, if she could ever get her hands on it.

She realizes the value of her mother's words now, that to be an honest person, one must be honest to oneself. She had gone away for the better part of a year, trying to find herself again, and in the end, she had gone back to where it all began, back to that one-room, rundown shack in rural Louisiana. She'd looked around, visited her mother and sister's graves, and then wondered...wondered for the first time in a long time, what had happened to little baby Eliot? What had happened to her nephew, her sister's son?

So she'd looked. She'd dug through the dizzying mazes of files and found who had taken him in, adopted him. She'd looked up baby Eliot's new name, and found his school records, medical records, and...a military portrait.

Eliot. Her Eliot, the team's Eliot. Eliot Spencer had looked back at her with her sister's eyes, and she saw, yes, she saw that this was her worst nightmare, her most coveted dream. To find the last of her family again, yet she wouldn't be able to lie to him about who she really is. Because he knows her. He knows her but he doesn't.

Eliot doesn't _remember_.

And part of Sophie (she's Sophie now, not Fancy anymore) wants to keep it that way. Another part, though, remembers the words her mother gave her: "To thine own self be true."

So she hints at it for a while, digs to see how much of his past Eliot really knows.

She confesses once (very much on purpose) that her Sarah Jane _Baker_ alias is her favorite because it reminds her of who she once was.

She drops a hint about New Orleans, how it so very inexplicably feels like home to her.

She uses an alias called Nell once, just to see how Eliot reacts. (He doesn't.)

Then she says, "To thine own self be true," as an appropriate response to something.

"_Hamlet,"_ Nate says. "Polonius to Laertes. A father's advice to his son."

"Yes," Sophie replies, disappointed at Eliot's non-reaction. (How could he react? He wouldn't remember his grandmother, her mother.)

By this time, she has become resigned to the fact that Eliot may not even know that he had been adopted, that it would be of no use to anyone to tell him who he really is, who she really is.

Until one day, Eliot shows up at her door, and asks to come in.

He looks around her apartment _(flat,_ the British part of her brain automatically corrects) and says, "Fancy," as if in an off-hand comment on the decor.

And then there _he_ is checking out _her_ reaction.

Sophie completes the charade. She walks over to the window and opens it. "There's a _bakery_ nearby. I just love the smell of fresh-baked bread in the morning. Something about the sun's _rays_ mixing with that smell."

A small smile twitches at the corner of Eliot's mouth. "Fancy Rae Baker," he says slowly. "That's your real name." He chuckles and shakes his head, slightly amused. "You lied to us even back then when you said you'd told us your name."

Sophie shrugs. "I lie. It's what I do. 'Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they'll be nice to you,'" she quotes her mother, giving the words the full Louisiana accent. "It's what my mama told me to do."

Eliot frowns. "That's what she told you to do? Your mother?" He can't believe that any mother would tell her daughter to sell her body. He should - he knows that people do sell their children - but Sophie?

She looks away. "Pa's runned off, Mama's real sick, and the baby's gonna starve to death," she says softly, in her real voice, for the first time in a long time.

"Was I the baby?" Eliot asks quietly. There's an undercurrent of anger and hurt in his question.

Sophie looks now. "My sister Nell's baby. She died having you, and your daddy? Who knows where he went after getting her pregnant. Welfare was the kindest thing that could have happened to you. Better than starving to death in a one-room dump out in the middle of nowhere."

It's Eliot's turn to turn away now. "You were really that poor?"

"So poor that my own mother sent me to the city to prostitute myself?" Sophie asks, the old rage heating her words, "Yes, we were that poor, Eliot. Of course, _you_ don't remember."

"Why didn't she sell this?" he asks, not even blinking at the sharp flare of anger shot at him. He pulls something out of his pocket and shows it to her in the palm of his hand.

A locket. The heart-shaped locket Mama had given her. _"To thine own self be true,"_ says the worn-down inscription, just like she remembers.

She reaches out a shaking hand to take it, but Eliot closes his fist with a snap.

"Sophie," he says lowly, "I swear, if you're conning me..."

The horror she feels at that must show in her expression because he softens and gives her the trinket.

"There's a letter, too, if you want to read it," Eliot says. He holds the yellowed envelope out to her.

There, her mother's crooked, illiterate writing. A letter to Eliot, her grandson, telling him his family history, about his mother, his grandparents, and his aunt (but not a word about his father). It tells him that of everyone, it's only his Aunt Fancy left, and if she ever comes looking for him, the locket enclosed with the letter is how she'll know him.

"She gave it to me. When I was leaving. But I didn't want it. I thought it was a lie. So I- " she stops and wipes away a tear, "I tore it off and nearly threw it at her. I didn't realize that what she was giving me was her legacy. Be true to myself, never lose _myself."_

"So did you find yourself?"

"Not where I thought I would," she replies.

"When you came back that time, you knew," Eliot says, "But you still didn't tell me. Why didn't you tell me?" He's not _angry, _just confused.

Sophie sighs. "You'd just gotten over your trust issues with me - and you were right not to trust me after what I did - so to tell you something like this, right out of the blue? I didn't even know if _you_ knew that you were adopted. Why should I destroy a perfectly normal childhood with tales of poverty and spring a long-lost aunt on you?"

"My mother," Eliot pauses and corrects himself, "The woman who raised me gave this to me before she died. I've known a long time, but I never knew how to find you."

"I changed my name right away," Sophie says, "Fancy Rae is so _common."_

They share a quiet laugh.

"Fancy Rae," Eliot says, "That sure doesn't fit the Sophie Devereaux I know."

Sophie smiles softly. "But she's in here somewhere. I pull her out once in a while to air. A scared, half-grown woman-child, going out into the big world, leaving everything familiar behind her."

"Sounds like the beginning of an adventure," Eliot remarks.

"Oh, it was," Sophie says, "It was. Do you want to hear about it?"

"No tall tales now," Eliot warns, and seats himself on her sofa.

"I would never!" protests Sophie, his...Aunt Fancy.


End file.
